Hats off to the gentleman who suggested setting do_rfc1323 to 0.  With this
in place, ftp between my two netbsd's (through a linux gateway) has suddenly
become tolerable, even quite comfortable.

I will leave it as an exercise to the reader how Linux is breaking on this
option; suffice it to say that swapping to non-rfc1323 kernels *on both machines*
has made the problem go away.  Hooray!

(Sorry if this is insipid, but for the first time in three weeks I can see
myself type.)

-s